Trained to Fight Both in Court and on the Street

Chatting with Deputy Dist. Atty. Darren Levine in the hallways of the criminal courts building in downtown Los Angeles, it’s hard to imagine that the disarmingly friendly prosecutor could be a show-no-quarter expert in the rough-and-tumble world of street fighting.

But when you catch Levine at his Krav Maga self-defense training center, the husky Mr. Nice Guy has exchanged his pinstripes for battle fatigues, put on a mean face and started barking out instructions like a Parris Island Marine drill sergeant.

“Looking at him in a suit, you would never suspect he could kick your butt 40 different ways,” said Deputy Brian Muller, a use-of-force instructor for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. “You just drop your jaw when you see him training.”

In action Levine is the same: tenacious and passionate, said Burbank Police Sgt. John Dilibert, who has seen him in both courtrooms and training rooms.

Defense lawyer Michael Artan, who went up against Levine in a murder trial last year, agrees. “He fights very hard to win, and that is certainly a parallel [with Krav Maga],” Artan said.

“Darren pulled out all stops,” said Artan, whose client, Catarino Gonzalez, was convicted of murdering a police officer. “But he’s fair and square, and I have a great deal of respect for him.”

Krav Maga, Hebrew for “contact combat,” is the self-defense technique used by Israel’s military and anti-terrorism units. It’s less ritualistic and not as focused on form and rules as kung fu and other martial arts. Instead it is more like the art of street fighting, or, as one writer put it a decade ago, Krav Maga is to karate what slam dancing is to ballet.

It also has a common-sense, anything-that-works element to it, said Levine, chief executive and chief instructor at the Krav Maga National Training Center on West Olympic Boulevard.

Krav Maga fighters resort to kicks in the groin, elbows to the jaw, pokes in the eye, whatever it takes. Only, they have been trained to deliver those blows explosively, efficiently and to the places most likely to stop a street hoodlum.

“Once the threat ceases, so does our counterattack,” Levine says. “We’re not training people to go out and punish people who have attacked them.”

Levine believes that Krav Maga makes him a better prosecutor. He says the mental discipline required for training antiterrorism agents, SWAT officers and law enforcement instructors carries over to the courtroom.

“It’s very methodical in terms of how you prepare yourself to be a warrior in the fighting world and how you prepare yourself to be a warrior in a high-profile court case,” Levine said.

To be effective in training law enforcement officers, an instructor has to gain their trust, which a prosecutor also must earn from a jury, Levine said. “Jurors take their jobs seriously, so they have to believe in me,” he said. “They have to see my passion and feel it and trust me.”

And Levine has surely been successful with juries. He has prosecuted more than 75 cases at trial without a loss. Last summer, he won a death penalty verdict in an 18-year-old case involving a convicted cop killer, Michael Anthony Jackson, whose 1984 death sentence had been overturned on appeal.

In the Gonzalez murder prosecution, which resulted in a life sentence, Levine’s team shot up a police car to simulate the attack and then played a videotape of the re-creation to jurors. Finally, in a stemwinder of an oration, Levine upset Gonzalez’s mother so much that she lost her composure. “Tell him to stop!” she screamed, before storming out.

With his sixth-degree black belt, Levine is the highest-ranking expert in Krav Maga outside Israel, where the technique was developed. A 10-degree black belt, which no one currently holds, is the highest.

He and his wife, Marni, opened their Westside training center in 1996. She holds a fourth-degree black belt, making her the highest-ranking female expert in the world, he said.

Levine, 42, has been enamored of martial arts and boxing since he was a youth in the San Fernando Valley trying to keep up with his older brother and his friends on the basketball court.

“I didn’t like being pushed around,” he said.

At Cal State Northridge, he began thinking about becoming a lawyer. In 1981, the Israeli Ministry of Education and the Krav Maga Assn. of Israel conducted their first international instructor course. Levine was accepted and trained with the Israeli military, seven hours a day, six days a week for six weeks. It was brutal, bruising and bloody, he said. “The realness of it humbled me. In fact, it was and still is the most humbling experience I have ever had in my life,” he said.

Of the 23 U.S. citizens who took the course then, only seven, including Levine, passed.

Krav Maga was designed for the Israeli military by Imi Lichtenfeld, a Czechoslovakian Jew who fought in the Israeli war of independence and later refined the technique to suit civilians. Lichtenfeld, who died in 1998, took special interest in Levine, and they began a long-term relationship, taking training trips to each other’s countries.

Levine completed law school in 1988 and became a deputy district attorney in 1990. In recent years, he has specialized in cases of murdered police officers.

“I learn a tremendous amount about self-defense by reading police reports, by interviewing victims and officers who are victims of attacks, experts on use of force, witnesses to crime and coroners.

“I have two professions that I love,” he said. “I cannot see my life with either one not being a part of it.”